Compute Midwest: Box COO Dan Levin On The Post-PC Era

Alex Knapp
,
Forbes Staff
I write about the future of science, technology, and culture.

I'm blogging today from the Compute Midwest conference. It's being held in the beautiful Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. It's a pretty young crowd of programmers and IT guys, and there's a big lineup of speakers from the tech world. The first speaker is Dan Levin, the COO of Box, a cloud business collaboration software company.

"I'm not going to talk about Box at all for the next 40 minutes," Dan Levin began. "I want to talk about the future."

The future Levin focused on - as you might expect from the COO of a cloud software company - was on the post-PC era of mobile devices. He started off by noting some things that we're all aware of, but are worth re-stated anyway: first, that the x86 platform will only have a 25.1% market share in 2016.

Second, and significant to him: the workplace has fundamentally changed. He asked the crowd how many people had an Apple or Android device - and of course most of the crowd raised his hand.

"None of that existed five years ago," he pointed out. "Five years ago, a phone was just something you talked on."

He went on to note that the real future of IT isn't about knowledge workers - it's about the industries of people using mobile devices that you wouldn't think of as knowledge workers.

"Truck drivers are using iPads to know where to deliver goods. Pilots and mechanics get the latest FAA announcements. Construction workers are using tablets instead of clipboards. Utility workers are using augmented reality before they start digging with their backhoes," he said.

"The post-PC world is going to create 1.3 billion knowledge workers by 2015," he continued. "And there's nothing we have to do to get there. That's a huge impact on the kinds of customers we can sell to."